Please Ottawa, make my kids eat better

A poll suggests Canadians accept that a child’s weight is a parent’s responsibility, but also feel strongly that the federal government should do more to fight obesity. For example they want fast food restaurants to list nutritional information on menus, and similar labels on packaged foods. Does this make any sense? If you feed your kids junk food for lunch, and don’t know by now that burgers and fries aren’t health food, will labels help?

Lorne Gunter in Edmonton: Aye yi yi. We’re becoming a nation of nanny-statists. The survey referred to in our forum question doesn’t just say that Canadians (90%) want fast-food restaurants to be forced to list nutritional info on their menus, it says the same percentage want “easy-to-read information tables on the front of packaged foods” by law! Eighty percent think Ottawa should restrict the marketing of high-fat, high-sugar and high-salt foods to children – 75% would outlaw such advertising entirely. And 90% feel the federal government – the feds, not the provinces or municipalities – should pay for more recreation facilities for youth and require developers to make new subdivisions more bicycle and pedestrian friendly so little fatties can “incorporate walking and cycling into their daily routines.”

In short, while we may say we believe childhood obesity is the fault of parents, we truly blame government for not spending billions to keep kids slim and for not passing laws removing the temptations from their daily lives so parents don’t have to do the tough work of minding what their kids are eating. We want our kids skinny, but we don’t want to have to work to keep them that way. In our opinion, that’s Ottawa’s job.

To some extent, the results show parents telling pollsters what they think the proper answer is. If someone costed out all these initiatives and showed parents what that would do their tax bills, I’m sure support levels would drop dramatically. But it’s free to say you’re in favour of healthier kids, so who wouldn’t?

There is also an element of ignorance in these results. I’m a carb counter. I’ve had to lose lots of weight in the last couple of years, so I check the nutritional content of most foods I eat, particularly for carbohydrates, and I know most foods have good, easy-to-read nutrition labels already. And for those that don’t, there are plenty of apps for smartphones and websites for computers that offer quick and handy nutritional info. Fast food chains already offer food-content details on their websites and in their restaurants.

If you want this information, it’s already available. What the government cannot give you is will power or the ability to cajole your angry teenager or whining toddler into eating better or getting away from the video game and going out to exercise. That is entirely on you. No amount of government spending or meddling is going to solve this problem. It is just going to leave us with bigger, more expensive, more intrusive government – and the same number of fat kids.

Barbara Kay in Montreal: I’m of two minds on the nanny statism, only because it is children’s health we are talking about, and children are totally at the mercy of adults when it comes to their general health. Not just health meaning the absence of disease, but in a more holistic sense. Depriving children of certain kinds of activity in youth is to deny them physical literacy, which is much like language literacy and musical literacy in that the earlier you start the better. If a kid doesn’t run a lot in childhood, he won’t run properly later. Or throw a ball correctly. These are now well-known facts and Sport Canada is much preoccupied with getting kids active when they are young in order to increase the pool of athletic talent from which to draw its potential sporting champions. You need nanny statism to make that happen, and I am for prescribed instruction and encouragement by schools of physical activity of all kinds. Once they’re home, and their wretched parents allow them to moulder in front of TVs, there is nothing to do about that. But while at school, attitudes can be fostered that may have a trickle-down effect.

As to food: I agree with Lorne that more and more labelling is not the answer, although minimal labelling such as we already have is fine. Educated people know how to read a label for information on fibre or carbs or protein or whatever. But those are motivated people. There is a great swathe of people out there who are not. And they could care less about labels: they want taste and comfort, and if fat, salt and sugar in super-abundance provide it, that’s okay with them.

Prohibiting food groups and taxing them excessively are the lazy and impatient solutions and don’t work, unless you live in Singapore where chewing gum can put you in jail. The only thing that works is education and shaming. It worked with tobacco over time. People still smoke, but most self-respecting people don’t – or if they do, they smoke furtively and and in isolation, and virtually nobody gives their kids the impression that smoking is benign. Parents must be force fed education and so must kids. Schools must harangue parents about nutrition, and kids should study it from Grade One. They should study cooking at school and be exposed to simple ways to make healthy food taste good. Bring in charismatic young chefs to have fun with the kids. Send brochures home with colourful pictures of what a healthy lunch looks like. Offer evening courses to parents in nutrition. Offer prizes to students who come up with nutritional concoctions that other kids like to eat. Grow vegetables in school gardens.

School itself is a form of nanny statism. Children’s safety at school is their responsibility. There’s nothing wrong with the schools leading horses vigorously to water, even if most of them won’t drink for a while.

Matt Gurney in line for a crueller: While I normally look askance at the nanny state, a problem we do need to admit we have is that kids don’t know how to take care of themselves yet and aren’t being taken care of by their parents. This came up last year when a Chicago school banned parents sending lunches to school with their students and made the kids eat healthy meals prepared at school. I’m not comfortable with that, but I’m also not comfortable with kids being 200 lbs.

But the nanny statism we’re talking about here is lame nanny statism. People don’t need a label on a fast food burger to know it’s bad, and kids wouldn’t read them, anyway. So why even consider it? Easy. It’s the typical Canadian feel-good approach to problems: Get the government to spend a lot of money (and then claim the spending as an accomplishment all by itself), force the private sector to get involved in some bizarre capacity, and then try to look away as this fails to in any way impact on the problem.

As to how Canadians seem to be asking for it, I guess the Conservatives hasn’t converted us into Harperland quite enough for us to have lost our love of big federal programs. I’m not at all surprised that, when asked if the government should be doing more, Canadians reflexively answer yes. It’s part of our national character. We don’t bother to ask ourselves how much it will cost, or what level of government should be handling it. Once we identify a problem, and obesity among kids is definitely a problem, we want something done about it, and The Government should do it. Now, I quite agree with Lorne — the instant Canadians actually had figures put in front of their faces, they’d rediscover their inner fiscal conservative. So maybe that’s what we should do. Forget putting nutritional information on the front of food packages. Let’s force every poll question, policy proposal and errant thought to come fully costed.

In the wake of a Grammy Awards ceremony that disappointed many, from Kanye West to the masses on Twitter lamenting the state of pop music, a historical perspective is key. Few are better poised to offer one than Andy Kim.